Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism by Thomas W. Devine

Author:Thomas W. Devine [Devine, Thomas W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Political Science, Political Process, Campaigns & Elections
ISBN: 9781469602042
Google: oOaJCpyZFW8C
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2013-05-27T04:09:48+00:00

Most young liberal activists shared the former first lady’s skepticism. The YPA, despite launching a vigorous drive for new members, never gained a significant following outside of New York City and a few other urban areas where the Communists had pockets of support. Among working-class youth, the group made little headway, despite its focus on local, “bread and butter” issues. One activist spent the last six weeks of the campaign in Chicago trying to organize “trade union youth” into the Wallace movement. “Our success in this field was very limited,” she recalled. “In Chicago, as throughout the country, we could not make any significant breakthrough.” The Young Progressives’ bold stands against segregation in parks, swimming pools, and other recreational areas did win them scattered support from African Americans in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, some of whom would later make a name for themselves in mainstream politics. Among YPA members in Chicago were students from Roosevelt College such as Gus Savage, a future congressman, and the future Chicago mayor Harold Washington. Despite the Young Progressives’ courage and sincerity, however, they at times chose their battles unwisely, thereby undermining other liberal youth groups’ efforts to fight discrimination. Often their confrontational tactics lost them potential allies, and, accordingly, their attempts to increase their community influence fell far short of expectations. Ultimately, the YPA’s appeal—beyond that to young members of the Communist Party—remained limited to a small segment of left-leaning college students.15

The temperament of these “campus radicals” may partially explain the organization’s failure to broaden its base. Dorothy Thompson described the young Wallace partisans as “the ‘intellectual’ type of know-it-all which manages to get itself heartily disliked by its contemporary comrades, and thus [is] pushed off into an isolated clique.” Though uncharitable, Thompson’s characterization was not as far off the mark as indignant YPAers claimed.16 On the increasingly conservative postwar campus, the young Progressives did sound a discordant note. Karl Schmidt, a YPA leader at Colgate University, found among the student body “general apathy over the possibility of future war or depression and a much greater concern over immediate job prospects.” Campus Progressives, on the other hand, set their sights on abolishing global injustice. “These young folks want to remake the world entirely, and in a hurry,” observed Tom O’Connor of the New York Star. “Strike up a conversation and you get a lecture . . . on what’s wrong with the world and what ought to be done about it, right away.”17 Grimly determined in political style and sentiment, these earnest crusaders often found that their own lack of humor made them the butt of their fellow students’ jokes. Frequently, Wallace rallies on campus deteriorated into raucous shouting matches in which a small group of Progressives fended off the jeers of their classmates. In one of the more elaborate anti-Wallace demonstrations, several students from the University of Pittsburgh decided to “ridicule the ridiculous.” Amid shouts of “Comrades! On to Helsinki!” a group of young men—one sporting a paint-on “Stalin-style” mustache and clad in

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